The Instinct of Philosophical Positions

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Lyonbyte
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The Instinct of Philosophical Positions

Post by Lyonbyte »

A person's faith or underlying psychological need drives one to certain philosophical positions. There is, for instance, something else underlying the argumentative drive of most philosophers who argue for the scientific world view, aiming for the truth and against most everything posited by faith, and in the extreme even arguing against all metaphysics. The naive realists and nominalist types are particularly annoying in their dogmatic delusions. I think the creationist, spiritualist types are just as dogmatic, and just as driven by their instincts which make them feel the need to argue just the sorts of positions that obsess them. I mean to suggest that the majority of philosophical debate is not at all free and rational, though philosophers would like to think that their use of reason in various ways makes them rational. There is such thing as an instinctual, irrational, habitual, and dogmatic use of reason. It appears downright pathological when they employ the methods of a pure logical calculus in the attempt to give greater justification to things that amount in the final analysis to mere belief. I say "mere" because the ostentatious pretensions of logical rigor with regard to knowledge are comedy, the success of scientific and technological inquiry notwithstanding. Who would want to make philosophy into an ape of science, as if argument were to produce the final truth about all existence in the form of a set of valid syllogisms? Nonsense! It all has nothing to do with actual truth anyhow, but with just that which one needs the truth to be in order to live, in order to compensate for the absurdities and horrors that afflict the mind. And people are afflicted with different horrors and different combinations of absurdities and thus keep vigil over various styles of philosophizing as an expression or symptom of their life experience, the cause perhaps going straight down to their physiology.

Of course, I am just making an observation that Nietzsche pointed out over a hundred years ago, but the consequences here, when one ponders well enough, will certainly be yet another symptomatic style of philosophy. This set of realizations, I claim, gives rise to the whole complex that makes up a Diogenes living in a vat. One ultimately becomes like an Indian sadhu, raving with lunatic wisdom, wondering in a fully conscious exile.

Yet, I think its telling that the philosophy of Diogenes was the lineage of Zeno and brought forth Stoicism. This makes me think Stoicism is the best of the entire Western philosophical tradition and Diogenes is the patriarch. But then, its not the truth that matters here, rather it is all matte of style.
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